Daniel Dennett is visiting Indiana University this week; I’ve heard him give two talks so far, and there’s one more on Thursday. Dennett is a philosopher of mind at Tufts who has written about evolution, consciousness, free will, and most recently about the study of religion as a natural phenomenon. He writes on topics that are central to the idea of humans as thinking meat, namely, naturalistic explanations of how our minds work. Until yesterday I had not heard him speak so I didn’t know that in addition to being a brilliant writer he’s also a very entertaining speaker. Yesterday he talked about consciousness and tonight about free will. I’m not going to try to summarize either talk, because both of the talks and the discussions after each were extraordinarily rich in ideas. But here are a few of the things that stuck in my mind:
When talking about what an ideal theory of consciousness would look like, he said it would be like walking into a deserted factory, everything chugging away and all the work going on, but not a person in sight. I can see why it might be a disconcerting image, but I like it. It’s obvious to anyone who pays attention that we don’t have anything like the whole picture of what’s going on in our brains, and I can live with the idea that the experience of being conscious is an intriguing and complex property arising out of the way the mental machinery runs (and that there’s nothing particularly mysterious that needs a supernatural explanation). Dennett quoted with relish a detractor who said he claimed not that the emperor had no clothes, but that the clothes had no emperor; that’s actually a pretty good way to put it.
Dennett used the concept of magic and various nifty visual illusions to discuss the nature of reality as it relates to consciousness. This is I believe a direct quote from his last slide: The “magic of consciousness”, like stage magic, defies explanation only so long as we take it at face value. Once we appreciate all the non-mysterious ways in which the brain can create benign “user illusions”, we can begin to imagine how the brain creates consciousness.
He spoke of free will as arising out of the “evolution of evitability” (evitability being the degree to which events can be avoided). Evitability is increasing in the world, and our evolved competencies give us moral agency and responsibility even though absolute free will isn’t possible and isn’t worth wanting. As an example of the increase in evitabiilty, he spoke of how we could conceivably avert an asteroid strike, given sufficient warning; “The planet after three billion years has grown a nervous system, and we’re it.” As a beautiful description of the increase of evitability, he offered the following quote from Paul MacCready: “Over billions of years, on a unique sphere, chance has painted a thin covering of life—complex, improbable, wonderful, and fragile. Suddenly we humans, (a recently arrived species no longer subject to the checks and balances inherent in nature), have grown in population, technology, and intelligence to a position of terrible power: we now wield the paintbrush.”
These are just a very small selection of highlights; if you want to learn more, you need to read the books. This evening Dennett recommended the following to someone who hadn’t read any of his books yet: start with Darwin’s Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life, then read Freedom Evolves, then Consciousness Explained (which he said is his most difficult book), and finally his latest, Breaking the Spell.
